I tell you one thing though, whether it fits in or not, I'm just happy it's being built! It's amazing that in a few years we've gone from hoping that something tall, even one tall tower got built at ground zero to dismissing supertalls as maybe being a little too flashy. We are becoming spoiled. Just wait until the whole Midtown thing gets rolling....

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

It's amazing that in a few years we've gone from hoping that something tall, even one tall tower got built at ground zero to dismissing supertalls as maybe being a little too flashy. We are becoming spoiled. Just wait until the whole Midtown thing gets rolling....

Hmm, I never thought of it that way.

Mid-town will be no less than transformed.

__________________
"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in."

ALL 4 towers... WTC1-WTC4 will be LEED rated similar to WTC7... which is LEED silver... I believe. Whether Con-Ed will allow back-up generators to be hooked to their grid is supposed to be worked out shortly (within a few months). Then BofA can hook to the grid and other residential towers can do the same. ConEd claims they are trying to define LEED standards that meet not only electrical engineering NEC code standards but also their electrical grid design standards and these standards should be completed shortly. Then, (supposedly) all LEED buildings (who are currently waiting to hook to the Con-Ed grid) can "connect".

We'll see how long this will take (maybe 3-9 months from now). So, by the time the WTC towers come on line in 2011 - 2013, this should not be a problem.

Based on this picture, its hard for me to wrap my mind around what the top will exactly look like. It seems that the diamonds aren't symetrical with each other. Is this a fact or is it just an optical illusion?

Maybe its just me, but if you look at the first picture above, I see a very slight asymmetry about the diamonds, which makes it seem even more interesting IMO. Very smart idea if you ask me. If they were all equally sized it wouldn't captivate your attention as much.

Maybe its just me, but if you look at the first picture above, I see a very slight asymmetry about the diamonds, which makes it seem even more interesting IMO. Very smart idea if you ask me. If they were all equally sized it wouldn't captivate your attention as much. I'm more excited about this tower than anything else at the moment.

I think it's just the photo.

But we should all be excited. As work is being done on the tub, which will immediately
be followed by construction, you could actually say towers 2, 3, and 4 were in "site prep" stages...

pathrestoration.com

pathrestoration.com

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

So will 1WTC and 2WTC start rising around the same time or is the 'site prep' simply the enforcement of the slurry wall & foundation of the entire site?

2 WTC, or 200 Greenwich, will be the last of the 4 to start, but they will virtually all rise together. Towers 2, 3, 4, and then 5 will be in the new tub that's being constructed now. Only the Freedom Tower will stand in the original tub.

Quote:

Originally Posted by djvandrake

It's fantastic to see the Port Authority getting things ready for construction!

It's being done quietly, but I find this part to be exciting as well. It's the same process as the original constuction - slurry wall for the tub first, then everthing else.

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.

The digital clock, red and glowing, counted down silently to the next deadline: 72 days, 13 hours, 37 minutes to go.

It was 10 a.m. on a recent Thursday and 25 architects, engineers, consultants and project managers were seated around a conference table on the 10th floor of 7 World Trade Center. At one end of the room, tall windows overlooked the World Trade Center site directly below. At the other end of the room stood a blank screen where a team from the architectural firm of Maki and Associates waited to make their monthly presentation to their client, Larry Silverstein.

Silverstein arrived shortly after 10. He took a seat at the front of the table closest to the screen. Behind him sat Mickey Kupperman, an executive with Silverstein Properties and overseer of one of the largest and most high-profile construction projects in the world: the building of three enormous office towers and hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail space. The towers are designed by the renowned architects, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki.

At 10:10, Silverstein clapped his hands twice, loudly.

“OK, let’s go,” he said.

The two-hour presentation would be dominated by a single topic, the glass curtain wall of the 974-foot, 61-story Tower 4 that will rise at the corner of Greenwich and Liberty Streets. It is just one of the countless details, large and small, that teams for the three architects will wrestle with in the months leading up to the construction of the giant towers. Here, on an entire floor turned into a design studio, is where the three projects are being developed in tandem in a collaboration that is perhaps unprecedented in scale. “Foster Rogers Maki,” a sign on the glass entrance reads.

On this day, Gary Kamemoto, director of the Maki project, showed images of views from inside and outside Tower 4. Midway through the meeting, Fumihiko Maki, who had flown in from Tokyo, entered the room, taking a seat across from Silverstein.

The presentation prompted regular interruptions from the developer, the push and pull of budget versus aesthetic a recurrent theme.

“I’m concerned about the longevity, the wearability of the surface. It’s totally exposed.” “Do you know what the cost difference will be?” “What is the affect from within? I’d like to see what it looks like standing from within.” “What troubles me is the lack of symmetry,” Silverstein commented about a tall, diagonal element on the building’s front.

“We are taking great care not to have a prosaic office building,“ Kamemoto responded.

After the presentation, the group moved to an outer room where they examined samples of the glass. Silverstein sat facing the Trade Center site and looked through the glass, trying to picture its appearance from inside the new building.

“This would be throughout the tower? One hundred percent from floor to ceiling,” Silverstein said, answering his own question. He pondered a few minutes more. “You know what? A mock-up makes sense,” he said.

“So we can proceed with constructing this almost immediately,” Kamemoto responded.

Despite his sometimes brusque questioning and no-nonsense manner, Silverstein pronounced himself pleased with what he had seen.

“I think things are going very well,” he said, then turned to Maki. “Your associates have done a superb job.” The two white-haired men of about the same age left together for a brief private meeting.

For everyone else, it was time to get back to work.

Roughly 75 to 100 people work out of the studio at one time, including representatives from the three main architectural firms as well as outside engineers. The largest contingent is from Adamson Associates, the architect of record for the entire project. There are a dozen rows of desks aligned into long tables that fill a room which spans an entire block, from Vesey to Barclay Streets. Along more than half that distance is a plain sheetrock wall papered with 3-foot by 5-foot renderings and schematics. Throughout the day reams of schemes and fresh printouts are tacked up around the room for frequent technical meetings.

Each month’s work is punctuated with a presentation to Silverstein on the three buildings.

The Maki meeting on Tower 4 was the last, affording everyone a breather from what some describe as an intense work atmosphere. As each building’s group ramps up for the next presentation, the pressure builds.

“On Wednesday, we were frantic,” said Rich Garlock, a structural engineer on Tower 4. “On Tuesday, Rogers was frantic. It definitely gets crazy.”

A few rows away, Margaret Sedyka, an Adamson architect and one of fewer than 10 women in the room, was puzzling over how stairs, parking and exhaust shafts will come together at grade.

Nearby, engineers Jason Hogle and Adriano Scacchi consulted together on fire protection systems for all the towers.

Towards the back of the room an architect with Foster and partners, Tomasso Fantoni, worked on the building’s intricate slanted, notched top. “Today we are trying to put together the top of Tower 2,” he said. “It’s really a challenging composition.”

While there is a lot of coming and going in the studio (most of the Adamson team shuttles between New York and Toronto; the Foster, Maki and Rogers teams do most of the design work back in their home offices in Tokyo and London), the three teams often collaborate at the 7 WTC studio, where they sit at adjacent tables. “We share the problems and try to resolve them together,” said Fantoni.

And there are no secrets, said Michael Jelliffe, of Foster and Partners. “You can’t be secretive in a place like this,” he said. “Everything goes up on the wall.”

The three buildings, unveiled by Silverstein Properties last September and known as Towers 2, 3 and 4 (the Freedom Tower being Tower 1) will spiral in rising heights from 974 feet to over 1,200 feet, for a total of more than 200 stories. The projects are divided into four phases, ending with the development of construction drawings that will lead to expected groundbreaking for Towers 2 and 3 by early next year.

The clock is now counting down on the design development phase, which ends July 1. It hangs at the front of the room where it is hard for the architects and engineers to ignore as they come and go.

“It’s scary,” said Hogle. “You try not to look at it.”

When the clock hit zero at the end of the second phase of the project on March 31, Grace Shabo, an electrical engineer, said she and about a dozen of her colleagues gathered beneath it, shook hands and “breathed a sigh of relief.”

That relief didn’t last long; the clock was reset a week later. For now, with many days, hours and minutes remaining, Shabo said the stress does not seem so bad.

“But when there’s about two weeks left,” she said, “it starts to tick louder.”

Following a presentation by Tower 4 architects, Silverstein peers through the proposed glass that would be one of the features of the building.

Developer Larry Silverstein said he expects to lease space at the three towers he's building at the World Trade Center site to Wall Street firms seeking new securities trading floors.

The lower levels of the two of new towers, designed by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, will have a total of nine trading floors with more than 50,000 square feet each, Silverstein said. The top of Foster's lower Manhattan building, canted in the shape of four diamonds, will also have "hedge fund space," he said. A third building is being designed by Fumihiko Maki.

"All three buildings will provide massive trading floors that are unavailable elsewhere in the city," Silverstein said in an interview. "We can provide this under spectacular circumstances."

Trading space is increasingly important for the world's biggest securities firms, which last year made more than half their revenue from buying and selling stocks, bonds and currencies. Merrill Lynch & Co., the world's biggest brokerage, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., and JPMorgan Chase & Co., are all in talks with New York developers about expanding trading space, people familiar with knowledge of the situation said in the past month. Silverstein declined to name the firms he's spoken with.

'Very Strong' Market

"We are producing space that is perfectly suited for the needs of major financial institutions," said Silverstein, 76.

"The market in New York is very strong. There is a need for quality space."

Silverstein said construction will start on two of the buildings at the trade center site in January. The Maki-designed property may not begin until July 2008, he said. The Foster building is at 200 Greenwich St. and the Rogers building is at 175 Greenwich St. The third building hasn't been given an address.

"The train is now moving down the tracks," Silverstein said. "We go into the ground the first of January for two buildings."

Counting the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, which Silverstein is overseeing under contract to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, nearly 10 million square feet will be under way in lower Manhattan by the middle of next year.

Silverstein bought the leasehold for the World Trade Center's twin towers six weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that destroyed them. He has an agreement with the Port Authority to build 6.2 million square feet of offices at the 16-acre site.

Office Rents Rise

Manhattan office rents surged to an all-time high in the first quarter with job growth in the financial industry pushing the vacancy rate below 6 percent, according to broker Cushman & Wakefield Inc. Asking rates for the best space averaged $64.54 a square foot.

The only office project completed so far at Ground Zero is a new building at the site of 7 World Trade Center, which has 1.7 million square feet and is 70 percent leased, Silverstein said.

The original 7 World Trade collapsed on Sept. 11 when the antenna from the World Trade Center's North Tower fell and "cut through the façade" of Building 7, rupturing fuel lines leading to storage tanks used by New York City's emergency services, Silverstein said.

"The cut fuel lines started a fire that started to burn around 9 a.m. and burned until 5 or 5:30 p.m.," when the building collapsed, Silverstein said.

The new 7 World Trade was built with security and safety systems that makes it "literally impregnable," he said. It has a two-foot-thick reinforced concrete core, better fireproofing and two emergency staircases that split into four in the lobby.

Moody's Investors Service has leased one-third of the 52-story building. Other tenants are ABN Amro and Darby & Darby PC.

With reporting by David M. Levitt in New York

__________________NEW YORK. World's capital.

“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.